What some lawyers and some companies learned a long time ago is that if you want to keep something private in the age of the Internet, you shouldn’t be coming up with ridiculous legal threats to protect its privacy. It will just blow over and get in the mainstream, generating crazy page hits. Push hard to get some documents kept out of a magazine, and you will get a lot of attention. Try hard to hide code you’ve leaked, and it will multiply.

Take your customers and their friends for idiots and you will get buried. Wow, I hope Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is not what Harvard hopes all of its students turn out to be like.

I can’t comment on allegations that Mark stole the idea. I can’t comment on allegations that he trashed a sublet in Palo Alto. I can’t comment on the fact that his court transcript indicates a poorly-spoken individual who can’t or won’t try to compose himself in the face of a court of law¹.

But when you’re already bringing in a lot of money, greed is your worst enemy. How stupid can you be to start tracking not only the users that make you rich but the people that don’t even ‘touch’ with Facebook? I don’t think only the P2P article above hints that Facebook might be going to the shitter² but a lot of other people might be feeling the same. The no opt-out feature of Beacon makes you a cash cow for Zuckerberg, like it or not. You are his slave - you get to sleep and eat on the farm but you better be generating revenue at all times. The ‘friend’ clause, then, means people that just travel in the vicinity of the farm get kidnapped and put to work too. Saying that you are “sorry” actually means “I’m sorry we tried it like this and you guys caught on, next time we’ll make it harder for you idiots to figure this shit out.”

Yes, I am biased. I don’t do social networking of this kind. And maybe sometimes I hear my friends rant too much about Facebook and what happens there. Heh, a year or three ago I would’ve been called out for being a geek if I mentioned anything that went on in IRC or on some forum; now, the cool kids have their face on Facebook and you don’t exist if you don’t exist on the site.

But were I on Facebook, I would be even more pissed. Think about it kids, you are being conditioned. It’s not so much about privacy³ as it is about teaching you to put up with bullshit. Telling you that for a service, no matter how big or small, how useful or wasteful, you must be ready to pay in blood. This is Zuckerberg telling you, with a smile, what a bunch of fucking clueless dweebs you are and how he will put your ass on marketing street. Ah

I sense I am a tad acidic today. You would say bitter or even envious I guess. There are over 50,000 people that have joined MoveOn.org’s privacy group on Facebook. And the many, many other people who are probably very annoyed by these news - and by being tracked by Facebook without being members of the site. So maybe I’m a bit bitter, heck, it’s the least I could do. Yes, spyware does this already - and yes, for now I declare Facebook to be spyware.

Homework: Think of what to do when Facebook crumbles.

1. Crap, does that count as me commenting on the topic? [↩]
2. If I believed in Santa, that would be one of the presents I’d ask for [↩]
3. A subtle distinction between privacy and anonymity exists, and I don’t believe there is much of the first and most of the latter when it comes to digital life [↩]